Hi there, I'm 6'1" white male Xtrabeing, welcome to the Fleshpots. Please don't be offended, but I like myself rather a lot. When stranger-girls shout out they want to have your baby to you, it tends to affect the ole ego a tad. 400 xwatchers come here daily and you're 1.

||$$$ War Only Works When The Prizes Taken Can Be Rewritten Over $$$|| /kursedmoan sonec! \

Hot wars, yeah baby, yeah, yeah

gotta love ’em. They’ve made the world as it is, reshaping and tectonic-plate-folding in super-fast-motion, and they will go on and on despite naysayers performing that sugary-sweet clash of opposing armies amusing little gigantic function until one World Conqueror sweeps up all the marbles in his hand. Then calls it quitsies.

In the S.M. Stirling Drakon series, there are orbital battle stations enslaved to the two superpowers: the Domination and America. Sharply dressed officers in the black-piped space services tender machines whose weapons are pointed down below at the Earth in ever-circling orbits.

The novels written by Stirling (one obscure li’l commentator on YouTube wrote that he met author Stirling and he said wrote them at “a bad time in his life” — something I doubt) are like mini-lessons in the way wars are only effective if they take a loser nation and rewrite/recreate it.

The losers in the American Revolution were the Drakon. A sensible victor would have “rewritten” them, so that their society was neutered and made ineffective and trembling on the world stage. Instead, the Drakon “grew up” and began taking over other communities and races, and rewriting them. In a starker way than real history shows, this alternate history depicts the utterly brutal effects of a total rewriting.

A milder example from our history can be seen in the 1066 Battle of Hastings win by the Northmen of France over the Saxons of England. The Saxons, who had themselves scooted away the Celts to win the prime South-of-England land, were “rewritten” into a new economic and political and linguistic order. When you hear “will and testament,” you are hearing the influence of French over English, and the endless parade of kings (always enjoyed that brutal picture of the reddish bearded King Henry seated grimly with fat cheeks on his throne, not giving a damn, unlike modern pussy Prince of Wales Charles, whose mommy seems to get to rule forever in place of an actual man, but she’ll be dead soon) demonstrated the screw-tightening of a system of royalty going down to the level of knights that would bind England forevermore. In a sense, the Saxons became aliens in their own (stolen) land.

If the Nazis had won World War 2, they would have “rewritten” absolutely everything about the East, creating slave armies of untermenschen and extracting resources in a machine-based society whose technical terminology would be German, corporations would be German, and weltanschauung would be Nazi. The G-G-N snake, like a DNA double helix of malevolence, would have wrapped around the Russian baby-state’s neck and choked.

America itself is a science-fiction concept come to life, dependent on the elimination of the natives and the birthing of a new way. It was an invasion, a war, as successful as the future American war against the sand niggers of Iraq. The West’s highest avatars — the American technosoldiers — could have seized the oil fields, but liberal values prevented and prevents that from happening.

As you can see from these numerous examples, wars only hold the imagination when they reshape society from the bottom up. A weak, watery conquest is one that only swaps land back and forth, as in the European medieval wars where a ransomed king at exorbitant prices was the only result of war. Now, in modern times, with the science of sociology as the wind in our fully rigged naval ship, we understand how to bring the most utility from war. It isn’t oil rigs or Internet social media giants (love to have one of those companies, though), that make the currency, perhaps money, perhaps power, we desire.

It’s a new story led forth at the tips of a serrated rank of bayonets that does it.